Revelation by Max Carver

Author:Max Carver [Carver, Max]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Speculative
Amazon: B07CCKLPH7
Goodreads: 39850678
Publisher: Max Carver
Published: 2018-06-22T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

The door creaked as they entered.

Hairline cracks were visible along the walls of the foyer, and several of the family photos had fallen from the wall, their panes shattered on the floor.

Eric tried the light switch, just in case, but got no response.

“Hello?” Eric said into the darkness. “Anybody here?”

“Where's the basement door?” Suzette whispered.

“Over this way—” Eric started toward the next room, a spacious living area with clay-brick walls and a fireplace where a few embers burned. The basement door lay just beyond the chimney.

“Come this way,” a voice said off to his right. His father.

Eric stepped back and passed through the archway into the dining room, where chairs were toppled over. The panes of his mother's china cabinet, where she kept the “special occasion” silverware and dishes for which no occasional ever seemed special enough, had been shattered, along with the crystal drinking glasses and china inside.

A swinging door led into the kitchen, where his father sat at the rough plank table by the fireplace. This was where they'd always eaten their breakfasts and family meals; the dining room was reserved for company and holidays. The kitchen was the true heart of the home.

His father sat here alone, his head turned aside as if he were looking out the door to the kitchen garden, which stood open and hung loosely by two hinges. The smell of herbs drifted in on the night wind. It wasn't as pungent now as it might have been in high spring or Gideon's long summer, but the scent was there.

“Dad?” Eric stepped into the room. Suzette clutched his hand tighter. “Where is everyone?”

“We've been looking for you for some time,” his father said.

“Where's Mom? Where's Abel?”

“You are the bearer of the relic.”

Eric felt his blood turn to ice. It wasn't his father's voice, not really. His father looked pale and swayed unevenly, like a marionette drooping on its strings, his long-ingrained straight posture oddly missing.

Then his father turned his head away from the open door to fully face him, and Eric felt terror.

Suzette gasped, and her nails clawed into his palm, drawing blood. At least it wasn't the worst pain she'd inflicted on him that night.

Long, pulsing white tentacles, mottled with gray, had penetrating deep into the right side of his father's face—ear, eye, and nostril. After a moment, Eric realized it was a single tentacle, with thinner ones branching off of it like the dendrites of a nerve cell.

“What...?” Eric's mouth was dry, and his mind was reeling, and he could barely form the question. “What did they do to you?”

“Look behind him,” Suzette whispered, her voice hoarse. She tightened her grip on the laser rifle, though it had to be depleted or nearly depleted by now.

Eric stepped toward the table and looked closer. The white and gray dendrite-tentacle was extended from near the head of a gray-white worm whose body stretched away down the back hallway behind the table. It was lightly armored, with weapons like he'd seen on the others from the slender black ship, including a meter-long syringe needle.

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